What’s Holding IT Back For IT, the challenges around networking—local area and wide area networks—include infrastructure complexity, inflexible enterprise edges, poor bandwidth utilization, slow delivery of applications across WANs and from clouds, and delayed application access for users from branches, remote sites, hotels, airports, and stores plus restricted budgets.

Complex IT that is costly to manage

IT environments are complex and operationally costly when managed with traditional approaches. Hybrid networks offer a way to mix high cost, SLA-guaranteed MPLS for business-critical apps with lower cost, public Internet for less critical apps to achieve new efficiencies, cost savings, and accelerated app delivery.

Inflexible and fragile enterprise edges

Changes in configuration for edge devices using CLI are hard to get right and can break an increasingly complex network. Defining which network path (MPLS, Internet, or Internet VPN) that each application should take based on traditional CLI-based routing is an administrative nightmare. Experienced, expert IT staff, who are in short supply, then must travel for weeks from site to site to take devices offline, reconfigure, test, and validate them.

Increased demand for bandwidth

Bandwidth-intensive video, real-time collaboration, and Internet services are driving demand for more WAN capacity. Yet applications traveling long distances across MPLS, Internet, and Internet VPN are still susceptible to slow performance, particularly in cloud deployments. And since business is increasingly conducted at the enterprise edge, no one can live with failed or slow apps or device downtime.

Harder to secure

Now with the cloud, direct Internet access at multiple remote sites bypasses data center-grade security services, making end-to-end security harder to realize and putting users and the business at risk.

Poor visibility

Applications are more diverse in type and growing in volume. Modern applications are encrypted, and application configuration also is increasing in complexity. Encrypted applications (SSL, TLS, HTTPS) are difficult to classify and segment, so app traffic is all treated equally, usually with high priority over MPLS networks. Encrypted apps and SaaS vendors, whom IT does not control, can make it hard to manage service level agreements and gain control.

Poor/Unpredictable

app performance Application performance directly impacts business performance. Today MPLS is often at capacity within organizations. As more enterprises turn to the costeffective Internet, they also experience a downside: no SLAs for Internet broadband and little or no visibility and control over performance.